Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Fearing Emergence of Pacifist Attitudes, Kremlin Cracks Down on All Anti-War Groups

Paul
Goble

Staunton, April 24 – Unlike during
the first Chechen war or the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there have been no
demonstrations against the war in Syria, the result of the Kremlin’s promotion
of militarism, its suppression of unfavorable news, and its crackdown on groups
like the Jehovah’s Witnesses that might have led them, Ivan Preobrazhensky
says.

“Having
chosen military actions as an acceptable instrument for resolving foreign and
domestic political tasks,” the political analyst says, “the Russian authorities
see in anti-war movements one of the main threats to their policy” and have
conducted “a struggle with them in all spheres of the life of society” (ridl.io/ru/война-есть-пацифизма-нет/).

Soviet
peace committees were disbanded in the 1990s or transformed into organizations
with a very different purpose, Preobrazhensky says. And “over the last four
years, all ‘traditional’ human rights anti-war organizations such as the
Soldiers’ Mothers Committees have suffered,” accused of being foreign agents or
otherwise harassed.

Over
the same period, he continues, the authorities came down hard on the Jehovah’s
Witnesses, “the most actively anti-war religious organization” in the country
and one whose followers “already in the Soviet period were well-known for the
fact that they preferred to go to prison than to serve in the military.”

Given
polls showing Russians overwhelmingly support military moves and even want
their relatives to serve in the military, all of these actions might seem unnecessary.
But in addition to the objections about military spending by systemic liberals
like Aleksey Kudrin and Aleksey Navalny, there is “great potential” for the
emergence of a pacifist movement.

The
reason for that conclusion, Preobrazhensky says, is that “despite the clearly
articulated militarist demand of society and the growth of the army’s
popularity, there exist deep social phobias,” first and foremost about the possibility
of a big war, which 75 percent of Russians tell pollsters say they fear for
themselves and their children.

“Thus,”
he says, “a growth in losses in real military conflicts and especially the appearance
of new ones could unexpectedly lead to changes in attitudes in society. But
this is [only] a potential.For the time
being, talk about war works only to frighten the population which is cut off
from information” from abroad about the real situation.

And
yet another indication that the Kremlin is worried about such a shift is its
increasing proclivity to discuss relatively small conflicts as harbingers of a
third world war, something that puts any public discussion of the merits of the
current actions of the Russian government beyond the range of the acceptable,
Preobrazhensky suggests.